The past few decades have seen incredible developments of technology and systems for computer-assisted, image-based, and image-guided surgery and other medical procedures. These advances in image-guided surgery are tied in part to technical and scientific improvements in imaging and three-dimensional (3D) computer graphics. For example, some of the early work of in this field in the late 1980's provided new 3D graphics rendering techniques, medical image shape detection, and head-mounted displays. These are some of the building blocks of later image-guided surgery systems developed in the mid-1990's and thereafter. Image-guided surgery makes use of imaging to aid a surgeon in performing more effective and more accurate surgeries.
Current image-guided surgery systems, however, do not provide adequate mechanisms to annotate images. The process of annotation is difficult and extremely time-consuming. Further, it would be difficult, disruptive, and time consuming for a surgeon or other operator to annotate an image during a medical procedure.
One or more of these problems and others are addressed by the systems, methods, devices, computer-readable media, techniques, and embodiments described herein. That is, some of the embodiments described herein may address one or more issues, while other embodiments may address different issues.